Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The legislature and salaries

Yesterday's CapTimes had a guest column by David Olien, former UW System senior vice president for administration. Olien argues that the legislature reveals "hypocrisy": They have kept themselves "among the best-paid in the nation", while they have driven down state support for universities and now turn their aim to the tech college system. "In short, in a peer comparison with other legislatures, they rank far ahead of UW faculty and staff compared to their peers." Remember, this is a guy who knows.

Of course, these people keep the actual 'salary' low, and pump it up with per diem, sick leave, retirement benefits, and so on. We see the same on campuses, of course. Faculty and staff salaries are being strangled, but if you check out administrative salaries, they have often skyrocketed. Seldom, of course, by a 'raise', but often by a 'reclassification', where staff people are given grander titles, with sometimes vast raises.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice editorial, sad facts.

Anonymous said...

This REALLY fries me. The whole 'business model' for business, government and education has proven time and again to be utterly bankrupt and wrong. Of course our "first CEO president" has brought valuable support for this view.

The situation Olien describes is nothing less than the enron-ization of state government and higher education. That is, it's criminal.